After 6 Years and 1 Million Miles, Shultz Still Relishes Life on the Fly

WASHINGTON — He was a week into his 30,000-mile tour of Asia, in the third of the nine Pacific Rim cities he would visit, when Secretary of State George P. Shultz allowed himself to talk, fleetingly, of the life he plans at the end of the Reagan Administration.

“I’ll be back at Stanford next year,” he told an audience in Indonesia. “They offered me a chair there. I told them I’m working hard and, by the time I get there, I may not need a chair. I may need a couch.”

It was a brief allusion to the remarkable way that Shultz has been spending his final year in office--which is to say, mostly not in the office at all but winging around the world. If the U.S. Air Force gave frequent-flier points, Shultz would bankrupt the system this year.

The recently concluded 18-day trans-Pacific odyssey was merely one of many. Shultz embarked on it only three days after returning from a trip to Central America. On Monday, he began another expedition, a 10-day jaunt through Central and South America.

Since the beginning of this year, Shultz has conducted four rounds of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. He traveled to Moscow twice to prepare for the summit of President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and a third time for the meeting itself.

Visits to European Capitals

The secretary has also visited Geneva twice to meet with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze and witness the signing of the Afghan peace accords. And en route to other destinations he has stopped in European capitals such as Brussels, Madrid and Rome.

According to State Department figures, on his trip to the Moscow summit, Shultz passed 1 million miles of travel, foreign and domestic, during his six years in office. In the first seven months of this calendar year, according to the department’s records, Shultz has been out of the country for 81 days, covering 145,056 miles.

He has traveled another 6,030 miles within the United States, the records show.

Why does Shultz do it? What purpose does such extensive traveling serve? And how does he manage to hold up under such a grueling schedule?

The answer to that last question is relatively simple. Shultz not only endures the overseas trips, he appears to relish them. His voice sometimes tires at the end of a long journey, such as the one to Asia. But generally, he seems more relaxed and cheery than an ordinary commuter on a domestic flight--or the secretary of state at a congressional hearing.

Rather Be Traveling

“George Shultz loves this,” said one U.S. official recently. “He would much rather be out traveling like this than back home at the office.”

Overseas, there are no White House or interagency meetings. The bureaucratic battles that he sometimes loses to the Defense Department seem a long way off, and so does Congress.

On his plane in Asia, reading a recently published book about the architects of American foreign policy immediately after World War II, Shultz remarked that there is relatively little about Congress in the book; men such as former Secretary of State Dean Acheson did not have to worry about Congress in the way that Shultz does.

The secretary travels, often with his wife, under conditions that would be the envy of even a tourist traveling first-class. He has no visa hassles, no airport delays. His bags arrive in his hotel room. Shultz, 67, manages to find time virtually every day for a swim, a game of tennis or a round of golf. Photos of the balding, stout secretary in a swimsuit occasionally make their way into the local press.

Still, Shultz’s Asia trip hardly qualified as relaxation or tourism. Most of his days were filled with official meetings, speeches, news conferences and internal sessions to analyze what had been or would be discussed with foreign leaders.

Diplomatic Purposes Served

U.S. officials working overseas say Shultz’s travels serve important diplomatic purposes by showing the American presence in countries--such as Indonesia, say, or Argentina--which are of considerable importance but are often overlooked in the crisis atmosphere of Washington.

For six consecutive years, Shultz has flown across the Pacific to attend the annual meeting of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)--the six countries of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Brunei, which represent, collectively, 300 million people and the United States’ seventh-largest trading partner.

Former Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. “came to the meeting his first year and then not the second,” said one senior American diplomat based in Asia. “People in Asia were really hurt. It means a lot that Shultz comes every year.”

Merely flying from country to country and showing the American flag does not by itself make foreign policy. In some instances, Shultz has come home from overseas with few or no practical results to show from his travels. That was particularly true in the Middle East, where his repeated efforts at shuttle diplomacy failed to win acceptance of an American peace plan.

On the other hand, Shultz is sometimes given credit overseas for helping to guide U.S. diplomacy toward change in a number of areas, such as Afghanistan, Cambodia and Angola, in a year when a lame-duck Administration was expected to mark time.

Chinese ‘a Bit Unsettled’

“I think the Chinese are a bit unsettled by all this,” observed an Asian diplomat in Beijing, referring primarily to the recent movement toward a settlement in Cambodia. “They originally thought this would be a very calm year when the two superpowers would be tied up on internal, domestic issues.”

The recent moves toward settlement of regional issues are primarily the result of an easing of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Shultz is not personally responsible for the improved climate, which reflects broad foreign-policy decisions in Moscow and Washington. Yet his frequent meetings with Shevardnadze this year in Moscow and Geneva helped give shape and scope to the new relationship between the superpowers.

Shultz’s travels also contain a bit of election-year politics.

In Beijing, the secretary got in a few plugs for Vice President George Bush. As television cameras rolled, he carefully conveyed best wishes to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping from both the President and from Bush, and he got Deng’s blessing for return greetings to both Reagan and Bush. At a news conference in Seoul that was held on the eve of the opening of the Democratic National Convention, Shultz moved to neutralize possible Democratic criticism of the Administration on the trade issue. He issued a tough warning that the Koreans should open up their markets to American goods.

‘Farmers Notice’

“We know every country has forceful political special interests,” Shultz said. “We have them. You think we don’t have farmers that notice when they can’t penetrate other people’s markets and that they don’t raise Cain?” If American efforts to sell goods in South Korea cause anti-Americanism, Shultz said, “so be it.”

For Shultz and his aides, there is an awareness that time is running out. During his recent trip to Asia--barring emergencies, his last trip across the Pacific as secretary of state--T-shirts were distributed that said: “George Shultz: The Farewell Tour.”